Time has pressed, like lovers grown
indistinguishable, these opposites
into the single syllable, the way a prayer or door
marries division to union. To cleave. To
cleave to, indivisibly splitting
its own infinitive. The sexual haft
embraced in the cold heft of broad axe,
emblem of everything between us. It renders
the distance intimate, diminished and close.
Christ does not come to bring peace but a sword.
Nan-ch’uan hoists the temple cat
against the blade demands a word
beyond yes or no, beyond one or two.
Who hid this word inside my world,
sang this edge through my flesh?
You did when you said,
I do. Do I contradict myself?
I am undone. This rift
draws us together, skin to skin.
We touch, as word and thing,
sound and sense, matter and mattering,
not one, not two
“These unique ants have evolved an advanced agricultural system….They feed on special structures produced by a specialized fungus. The ants actively cultivate their fungus, feeding it with freshly-cut plant material.”
Piece by piece these words, dis-
assemble the leaf before you,
carry it off on their serifed feet.
The silence signified in the empty space
held like a breath in their mouth, a flag
born above their thoughtless, intent heads,
across the margin, up your sleeve,
your neck. Into your eye
or ear, they bring their prised sense
to you. They seek purchase within your skull.
If you are silent, you can hear the clattering
mandibles even now as they arrange
and rearrange the stillness there in the verdant garden
of your mind where this very thought,
its threadlike filaments sinking in
even now,
takes root.
Under the upturned crescent of his brim,
green the green in green-cheese green,
his face a bright flush, his eyes bright planets.
He raises his cane, glossing a passage of Grace's
Hair Tinting, Moreales' Market, the Princess Pat
Beauty Salon and Bob's TVs. He gets along fat lip
chinook-hooked, bobbing in the eddies
of diesel and sulfur. He gets by
by heart. Negotiates. Turns the beautiful
blue flames of his eyes to the radiant heaven.
The window fills with romance and noon's disasters,
the receivers senseless and livid. Across the street
the cat stalks him from the window's useless view.
She sniffs and paws the screen while he passes
through the motion of red sports cars
filled with big-haired women. From one white margin
to the next, untouched. The traffic
lost in the palm of the miraculous afternoon
from which the earth turns with its quotidian,
blind, opulent, unsung.
Christopher Rappleye lives with his wife,three children, two dogs and two cats in St. Louis, MO, where he has resided since receiving his M.F.A.W. from Washington University's Writing Program in the late 80s. Previously he has had work accepted at The Virtual Word, River Styx, Sou'wester and Boulevard. He is currently assembling a 16-foot Hamlet puppet in his basement to battle a 50-foot long Very Hungry Caterpillar at a literary festival he is helping to organize for his children's school in the spring.
